Re: AUT: The "National Strike" in Venezuela

["chris wright" <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thiago,

Thanks for your earlier post, it was helpful.

In what ways do you see the PT as different, not from modern social
democratic parties or even the British Labour Party, but maybe more in
relation to the older Social Democrats, like the Germans in the late 19th
century, when they did represent a fairly militant and political base of
workers, a base which at times was rather more radical than the tops?  I
don't mean in terms of a direct comparison per se, though maybe a sense of
the genuine differences in class composition between Brazil today and Social
Democracy then would shed some light on concretizing the differences (for
example, the kind of industry that exists in Brazil is radically different
than the skilled workers of late 19th century Germany and the world market
is much more advanced, and Brazil is not one of the leading capitalist
powers relative to Europe, the US and Japan, but it is very developed in
most ways compared to the rest of the world and is more in line with Mexico,
South Africa (Tahir might say I am not being accurate and I am open to that)
and some of the so-called "Asian Tigers", but more so South Korea, which has
also seen mass working class struggles, but which faces different problems
(in no small part connected to the split in the country, the relations with
North Korea and the very dieep and direct U.S. and Japanese influence, where
as late as the mid-1990's, the US and Japan outright owned about 2/3 of the
total capital there.)

I am thinking more in terms of the relation of the PT to the class struggles
out of which it arose.  It seems that the PT has ossified to some degree
from its origins in the 1980's struggles against the military dictatorship,
in part in the face of formal democratic opportunities and a legal
existence.  Unlike the SPD, it has never claimed to be a Marxist
organization and in that seems in some ways more like the U.S. Socialist
Party, with its great span of politics from right to left, but with a larger
mass base (although, something many people do not know is that the SPUSA
held mayoral control over Milwaukee, a reasonably large industrial city
about 75 miles from Chicago, for about 50 years, but on a fairly
traditionally right social democratic base founded by Victor Berger.  I
suppose more than anything, I don't have a feel for it beyond a kind of left
populist (for better and worse) mass organization.

Also, Brazil has a large Afro-Brazilian population which is actually larger
than the African American population here, but Portugese colonialism and
early Brazilian independence combined with the later abolition of slavery
and massive quilombos gave the development of racial relations (the
racialization of class formation, if you will) a different character from,
say, the U.S., but also very much unlike say Angola or Mozambique, where
Africans were always the majority under Portugese rule (and where industry
to this day is phenomenally underdeveloped.)  How does that play out with
groups like the PT and with class struggle in Brazil?

Part of my curiosity in all this is to understand the specific differences
in class recomposition between the emerging industrial countries like
Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, South Africa, Argentina (?), Poland, etc. which
have had massive industrial struggles over the last 30 years of the sort
that have not been seen here at the same time.  Of course, both Mexico and
Brazil have massive struggles among the peasants who are increasingly
producers for the capitalist world market, and if not always turned into
direct wage workers are more coming under the real subsumption of their
labor to capital in ways that simply have no parallels with earlier peasant
populations (maybe in part due to the fact that they are being subsumed in a
period of a much more mechanized, productive capital in the still-dominant
industrial countries while they may be in part very industrialized on a
slightly more narrow and specialized base, among the industries which
capital tried to move away from the well-organized and militant workers of '
the North', such as steel, auto, ship building, some kinds of mining (which
is also very dependent on where the raw materials to be mined are), etc.

Interesting, isn't it, that oil-producing countries have been less
industrialized in some ways, maybe because of oil's importance and high
profits that if a country was oil-rich, it could afford to rest on that
mono-crop?  After all, compartively, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia (which, like
the whole Arabian Peninsula, also had a very small population), Nigeria
(which is the distant second industrial power after South Africa), and
Venezuela are quite a bit less developed overall?  I am here using
'developed' only to signify a relatively high organic composition of capital
and a relative diversity of sectors.

And then there are the giants, India and China, where India has a relatively
small but absolutely huge section of the population involved in the latest
technology via computers (especially in Banglore and other cities in
Karnataka, but also elsewhere like the big industrial state of Andhra
Pradesh), but that is about 70 million people among over 900 million people
and with areas like Kerala which are mostly tea plantations in the interior
and fishing villages on the coast.

Cheers,
Chris

> On the whole, I think that you are again mislead by your constant need to
> replay your ill-thought-out concepts with different puppets. The PT has a
huge
> popular base and cannot be easily assimilated to a model of Bourgeois
Social
> Democracy or whatever. Very clearly there is a set of conservative,
centralist,
> authoritarian fuckheads who have risen to the top, concentrating first at
State
> level then at the Federal level and now seeming to try to get a grip on
the
> troublesome grassroots with this city initiative. But on the other hand,
the
> grassroots are very, very strong, incomparably stronger than the popular
base
> of the white commonwealth labour parties, and far more radical - and
desperate.
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